Yokohama International Port Terminal

1995 – architecture competition winners FOA moved temporarily to Yokohama in 1999 Yokohama Ferry Terminal was only completed in 2002

photo from Foreign Office Architects via RIAS in 2004: Saturo Mashima

Review of Lecture by FOA:

Yokohama. This is the kind of project many of us dream of. After the description of the initial 32 sections becoming 124, and the ability to keep control of such a large irregular geometry building, I felt drained and guess that many of the audience were between bafflement and amazement. Farshid wanted users to get close to the heavy structure: ‘at times it is more baroque like’ and in the terminal, more classical.

She asked ‘how far you can take a package to make a system’. I enjoyed her simple pursuit of simplicity, the rough wood outside, the smooth inside, also the inventiveness of it all, ‘the floor became a kind of bench…bodily contact with the buildings is… very effective’. Some of the ideas and geometries seemed a little contrived, and expensive, but the radical newness forces us to evaluate the potential of building anew.